Don’t Pick Me to Help You If You Want to Survive

After this morning’s earthquake I realized I would only be a hindrance upon anyone who scooped me up to try and brave a dangerous situation, a natural disaster, or the end of the world with them.  This is me just exuding unselfish sacrifice. Even though I’m doing something that any compassionate normal human would do, I have severe entitlement issues, so please, thank me for this. If you want to survive something, stay as far away from me as possible, I am a danger to myself and more than likely worthless to you.

What made me aware of this is when I woke up at 6:25 AM this morning thinking I was dreaming then noticing that I was in a window rattling, shaking, somewhat moist bed bedroom real life earthquake. It wasn’t like other ones which I had either slept through, or felt like I was a happy drunk just swaying to a Monkees song.  It wasn’t a pleasant shake, it was a terrifying one. It was violent, which I can only describe as what a baby probably feels like moments before they are going to die due to an asshole who can’t get the baby to stop crying so they shake them, hard.  It seemed about 30 seconds long, but according to some news reports  it was closer to 10 seconds** (which proves the accuracy in the “Time flies when you are having fun quote”)  I don’t get how when something like that happens a person’s mind goes to counting the seconds it lasted. A lady was being interviewed and told the news anchor that during the quake she was going “1001, 1002…”  For realsy.

This is what I did during the natural disaster*…I pulled my covers up to my chin. That’s it. My mentality was I don’t know what else to do***, and I was pretty confident that if the roof were to cave in, my sheet, micro fleece blanket and six arbitrarily placed pillows would act as a force field and protect me. I was also pretty confident it would be a horrible idea to get out of bed, because if I did the floor will probably crack open and I would fall into the depths of the earth and you wouldn’t be reading this right now. Afterwards, I proceeded to stay in bed for 45 minutes wide awake. My alarm clock went through two uninterrupted cycles. I was very fearful (rationally, of course) that the aftershock would come as soon as my feet hit the ground and once again, knew that I would get sucked down into the depths of the earth.  I am not joking when I say that I had a feeling that it was a realistic possibility. It wasn’t until the sunlight finally hit my balcony doors and my mind made the decision I'd rather risk death by stepping on the ground than listen to the blaring sound from my alarm clock for another second.

These actions led me to the final realization that I cannot take care of myself during a crisis. It did however, make me feel a bit relieved because there have been those instances where others I was with had situations happen to them where I did nothing as well. Like the time a co-worker got hurt and I walked away and left others there to deal with it under the pretense that I was “going to grab an ice pack.”  Or the time a gun went off in a location I was at and everyone around me sprung to action and I just stood there and peed a little. I relish in the thought that my conduct today really makes me unselfish and a true disciple of the “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” Golden Rule.

I have been able to pinpoint where and when this behavior may have stemmed from. When I was little I had a babysitter who would sometimes bring her granddaughter with her (thinking back though, her granddaughter was kind of a bitch, so maybe she deserved this). We were in my patio and at the time we had a glass door that went into our house and there were two steps you went down to get into the house and we would jump down ledge... as a game because, you know…this was the late, late 80s and Grand Theft Auto for XBOX360 hadn’t been invented yet, so we had to make up our own games. I don’t know what happened but she either mistimed her jump and speed, or she had a suicidal ideology very early on in life, but she jumped, and she jumped hard…right into the glass door. There was glass everywhere and there was blood everywhere. I remember just standing there in place, frozen, while her grandmother came from inside the house. I then remember crying, like it happened to me. The next thing I know the ambulance came. I feel like either her grandmother or the EMTs had starting taking the big shards of glass out of her because I vividly remember the little drops of blood all over the concrete floor of our patio. I was kind of upset that nobody was paying attention to me, because it was just as equally or maybe even more upsetting for me than her. It’s kind of like when you see someone die tragically, the dead person is dead, they don’t have to worry about it, you on the other hand have that image in your head for life…4 LYFE.

Oh, yeah… you are probably wondering, she didn’t die, but still. She actually came back with her grandmother a couple of weeks later and she was a much nicer person than she was before SHARDS OF GLASS ’89.

To everyone: if you see me during a fire, a 3 car pileup, a tornado, a building collapse, a mass shooting spree, or anything you don’t think I can handle emotionally or physically, DON’T ENGAGE ME, don’t make eye contact, save yourself. And if I should perish, please let everyone know about this unselfish sacrifice. They need to know I was unselfish and didn't bring you down with me. THEY NEED TO.

*If you want to donate to help relief (mainly emotional) efforts don’t text REDCROSS to 99009, just text me your card # and expiration date, you will automatically be billed $30 on your next statement

** I don’t think it was only 10 seconds and I don’t believe it was just a 4.4 earthquake, I will be contesting these alleged “facts”

***I still don’t know what to do during an earthquake